And lo, on this most glorious and radiant of days, did it finally happen. Someone – specifically, an Indie DB user named “Chentzilla” – devised a means by which to do violence to one another in, um, Farming Simulator 2013. It’s described as “front loader sumo fighting,” and based off a video of two particularly determined tractors matching both wits and steel, I’d say that sounds about right. See this fierce, majestic thing that will surely revolutionize the gaming, farming, and being alive industries in action after the break.

I think this giant, farm-shaped canvas for the Internet’s collective mania has actually looped around to the point where it’s kind of interesting now. Here’s why: this “mod” doesn’t actually require any add-ons to the main game. Mortal Kombain, as it’s oh-so-wonderfully known, has been dubbed a “null mod,” so it’s really just more of an inventive rule set some wily players dreamed up.

There’s actually a fair bit to it, though. Different front loader loadouts, for instance, can alter your effectiveness in the tractatorial arena, and it looks like these back-and-forth bridge battles can get pretty tense. I mean, obviously it’s mostly just hilarious, and this will never – I don’t know – replace Team Fortress 2 or something. (That said, tractor hats! Someone, make this happen.)

But I am kind of fascinated by the idea of developing your own on-the-fly rule sets for games using raw creativity and nothing else. I don’t think people talk about it all that often – well, aside from speed runs, no-kill playthroughs, and those sorts of things. Do you play any games with your own sets of arbitrary restrictions? By way of that, have you more or less invented any new gametypes? I, for instance, can’t resist trying to carry oddball objects (piggy banks, traffic cones, potted plants, creepy dolls – that type of thing) through entire games if it’s an option. I get oddly, um, attached to them over time. But that’s not weird, right?

– Mark two “goals” on either side of a Gate, about 100km apart, with the gate in the middle. Must not be a regional gate though.
– There are two teams made up of any shiptype they feel necessary.
– PvP is optional, though tacklers and antitacklers might be allowed.

The Goal:

– Bump a freighter through the other team’s goal.

The Setup:

– wait for a Freighter on autopilot. When one jumps into the system and decloaks, the game begins.
– Everyone loses when the “Ball” manages to warp off.

– One large T2 warp disruption bubble is anchored in a remote section of 0.0 space unknown to anyone who enters.
– There is a restriction on ship type. Common are plain t2 fitted cruisers or frigates. Boosters may be allowed.
– There are no teams.
– Everyone gathers around a titan in a nearby system, a cyno is lit in the exact center of the bubble and all participants are bridged into the bubble.
– The THUNDERDOME starts when the cyno expires.

The Rules:

– Many men enter, One man leaves.
– Nobody is allowed to move once they bridge in or else they face extermination.
– Nobody is allowed to fire under penalty of immediate extermination.
– Nobody is allowed to leave the bubble except for the last man standing.
– Last man standing loots the field.
– No Podkills unless requested.
– The ship lighting the cyno is not to be touched.

The Setup:
-Start an eight player VS game.
-The Boomer spawns and heads to the Survivors.
-The Survivors must wait in spawn for the Boomer to arrive.

The Rules:
-The Survivors and the Boomer are friends, and will attempt to move to the safehouse together.
-The three remaining Special Infected attempt to kill the Boomer, either by attacking directly or tricking the Survivors into accidentally killing him.
-If the Boomer dies, the Survivors accept the same fate, and kill each other where the boomer dies (and accept the score accordingly).

The Goal:
-The Survivors must escort their new friend, the Boomer, to the safehouse.

– Build a rectangular arena with ice blocks on the floor and a 2×1 hole in each end.
– Excavate the area under the ice and fill it with lava for spectacular effect.
– Move a chicken into the arena along with two or more players.
– One team attempts to get the chicken into the hole of the other team.
– Replace chicken with pig for extra hilarity.

The Setup:
-Start a public Minecraft server
-Establish rules restricting player behavior that some deem “griefing” or “Trollish”
-Add a couple plugins designed to prevent griefing, but don’t expect them to actually work for long

The Rules:
-Whatever the admin actually enforces
-Effectively none while the admin is offline
-Definitely NOT the “community guidelines”

The Goal:
Find creative ways around the rules for as long as possible, following the letter of the rules if necessary, to cause the most chaos and destruction. The definition of “swastika” varies from person to person, after all. (Anyway, it’s Notch’s fault for making the world out of cubes, right?)

Because plugins actually do enforce whatever rule they are programmed with 24/7, try to find a way to exploit the rule so it inconveniences “nice” players. This makes their tears extra tasty.

If there is a zone where you cannot place blocks, find a zone where you can, and find where they meet. You may well be able to block off all entrances and exits to a place where you cannot place blocks.

Team Griefer:
You can get onto a server, and then post a video to youtube, getting your friends to join you and planning the destruction of specific landmarks. Remember to keep quiet about being on Team Griefer on in-server chat.

This is one of the best way to get around factions, but it does involve a bit of roleplaying to get Team Griefer on multiple factions at one. You may need to (gasp) actually follow the rules until some chump trusts you enough to let you on his faction. Then it’s a race against time to ruin as much faction property as possible. Protip: most faction groups are only on at certain times of the day. Start after the last chump leaves and you should have plenty of time.

Bonus Level:
Manage to get Mod status, and then savor it. Don’t use it right away, take your time and plan armageddon carefully because you ain’t getting another chance on this server, guaranteed.

Kill Screen:
While the general goal is to spread the sweet misery as far and wide as you can, there is an actual win state. If the admin has to reset the entire world to the start, or take down the server altogether, you win. Put a head on the wall of a building on your personal server, you just slew the beast!

*Please note, this is a somewhat sarcastic description of the attitude of griefers and the reasons why I never play public Minecraft servers anymore. I do not engage in this behavior myself.

We had a game similar to this in Global Agenda
It was called Huffball, and it only got played a few times as it required some planning beforehand.
The ball was an Assault, who would maximize shield uptime and use Perfect Target to keep themselvesin a large invincible bubble
They would be healed by a team of medics if anything went south

The opposing team in the match would be split into two sets of Assaults, who would use knockback weapons to try to fling the bubble Assault past the opposing goalposts

The Rules & Goal:
– The first person to get the golden gun is the toilet keeper, it’s their job to protect the toilets cleanliness
– Everyone else can either aim to be the toilet keeper (by killing the current keeper) or by vandellizing the toilets by graffiting the bathroom by paint-balling the walls.

We used to play this all the time when we were teenagers. It was always hilarious. You’d wait until the toilet keeper was busy with someone else before you started paintballing the toilets so you could graffiti as much as possible before you were insta-killed by the golden gun.

There’d always be someone trying to get inside the vents so they could graffiti without getting killed so some toilet keepers would make rules saying the vents were off limits. If you had the golden gun, you could completely abuse your power and make people do things such as become assistants (who would inevitably rebel).

The internet is an Ouroboros of self-reference, destined to collapse under the weight of its own irony.

Also while I don’t make my own rules outside the usual, In Minecraft I have a tendency to make a character and play out his life in a hardcore single-player world. I do this with a lot of games, actually.

Minecraft is pretty good for null mods in multiplayer. You have the arena game with the name that’s too ridiculous to utter, but you can also organize plain old deathmatch or CTF using nothing but the base game. Of course, Minecraft lends itself well to assaulting fortresses or infiltrating locations through tunnels; it’d be a waste if you just stuck to the traditional FPS game modes.

In New Vegas, I have a Chinese Stealth Suit, it increases my sneaking and my armor, but it looks super silly to walk around with it, so instead I walk with a Bright Brotherhood Robe. The robe offers no benefits but it covers my character’s entire body.

I like to pretend that my character is hiding the stealth suit underneath the robe and she won’t magically change outfits during a battle. She’s going to hide somewhere, remove her robe and go invisible Motoko style. If caught by surprise I cannot change outfits, even if they’re hotkeyed.

Also I can only carry a limited number of supplies and weapons, just one long barrel gun and two smaller guns, a handful of medical supplies that would fit in an imaginary bag. However I do not resist picking up all kind of trash I come across, though I store it all inside ED-E and very rarely do I give it to my human companion.

It’s not a computer game, but at Uni we had a small pool table with an incredibly warped surface. As conventional pool couldn’t be played very fairly (unless both of you had the same memory of which bits tilted where) we figured we’d add an extra element to the game to make it even more ridiculous, and change the skillset involved.

That extra element was a tiny plastic model of Buttercup, of the Powerpuff girls.

There was a huge range of Buttercup pool variants, from having to knock buttercup over with every shot, to having to never ever hit her, to having to pot her along with the eightball on the final shot. Also various combinations of the above rules.

Successfully potting a pool ball and a tiny plastic figurine with a tendency to fly wildly off the table at the slightest knock was probably my greatest acheivements at university. Apart from that one badass essay about politics in literature and whale blubber.

That’s the very one. I still have a boardgame (from White Dwarf?) that I cut out and put together, called ‘Shuggy Hall Brawl’. Best for lots of players. Basically a fight breaks out and you have x turns until the judges arrive to break it up. That’s it, baby, so stay cool Daddi-o, everything’s N for Normal round here..

I’ve bookmarked that vid in my browser for emergencies. Whenever I die a little inside from reading a degenerate racist white trash comment to some newspaper-article, I start the clip up and remember that people on the internet can also be fuckin’ awesome.

I had a thing in shooters which allow you to throw your weapon I would throw them at my opponent ala The Naked Gun/’Police Squad!!’.In counterstrike your opponent might even auto-equip this empty gun by accident allow you extra time to get stabby.

Really, everything that stacks in Deus Ex is good for this sort of behaviour. I do enjoy unleashing ten fire extinguishers one after another, while contemplating where I keep them, and drinking ten sodas in under a second. (burpburpburpburpburpburpburpburpburpburp)

A youtube guy played bf3 “rambo mode”, where one team consisted of a single support player with m60, and the rest of the players was on the other team with just pistols. Was hilarious to watch, never tried myself though.

Back in the good old days when PC games still supported split screen, a friend and I whiled many hours away on Need for Speed: Road Challenge with the low gravity cheat enabled. We would choose a lengthy straight – the tunnel area on Rocky Ridge was a particular favourite – position our cars at either end and drive, full speed, towards each other to see who could get flipped up highest into the sky.

Sometimes one of our cars would end up so high the other person couldn’t even see them on-screen any more. But equally funny, after the long build-up of charging towards each other, was failing to make any contact at all.

reminds me of some of the old Game for a LOL that Jim used to do for PCG long ago – I cant remember which game it was(operation flashpoint or something) but it was along the lines of everyone gets a tractor and lines up on a “starting line” – All have to race to a finish point and first one over wins. But, one person on the server got to spawn in a black hawk helicopter and had to hunt them down – remember thinking it sounded like an awesome way to spend an afternoon(still does!!)

Goldeneye 64 ‘Oddjob Mode’ – using a signal splitter we set up two TVs, one player controls Oddjob and gets one tv to themselves he may only use karate chops, the other three players are in a team on the other tv, they can’t see Oddjobs screen as it is covered over with cardboard. Oddjob can see everyone’s screen. Amazing fun, the last thing you see is a little bowler hat and then you die.

Project Gotham – ‘Cat and Mouse’ – Project Gotham 3 maybe? I forget, but it was on Xboxlive. Probably works with other games too. Divide players up into teams of two, each team gets one guy in the most powerful car in the game (the cat) and one player in a mini (the mouse). The aim is to push your mouse around the Nurburgring, first mouse over the line wins. You can also go and ram the other mice to slow them down. Quite a few people played this, it was brilliant.

My friends and I used to play a “Demolition Derby” game on GTA IV’s free-roam multiplayer. The idea:

-Everyone participating acquires a vehicle and meets up at the Helipad on the middle island
-Cars start parked on the corners of the helipad, close to the water
-Someone signals the start, and all hell breaks loose

The goal is to either ram an opposing vehicle enough until it wont start, or push them over the edge into the water (just like the tractors up top). It was always a lot of fun, especially if people brought large vehicles like the bus or garbage truck.

I don’t know much about farming simulator (is it purely crop farming or livestock?) but once I seen it I thought how amazing it would be if someone made an Animal Farm style mod were your animals constantly plot to overtake your farm and do horrible things to you and humanity.

We did that waaaaaaayyyyyy back in Need for Speed 2:
Two players, racing on a course with heavy traffic, but in reverse order. Try to crash into and subsequently flip over as many oncoming cars as possible. Bonus points for school buses and other large vehicles.

Complete 1 lap of the city using just the outer roads. No vehicles allowed. Must have a wanted rating of between 4 and 6 stars for the duration of the lap.

Minecraft.

Start a hardcore game. On the first day, gather everything you’ll need for a life underground. When the sun sets, dig down, seal the roof of your tunnel, and never set foot on the surface again.

That one came about due to Mojang’s insistence on ruining my worlds with every new version of the game, either by changing the biome generation code, or utterly refusing to fix the light bug that has persisted in the game for so long now I can’t even remember when it was first introduced. After a few months of looking at my awesome landscapes ruined by being covered in black splotches, I was like “fuck this shit, I’m staying underground from now on”.

I remember once seeing a dozen people doing this, so I just followed in my galaxy and provided cover. We made it about 3/4 of the way to the Elmo’s warpgate, then I took an AP round to the cockpit, and all of the ATVs got killed trying to cross a bridge which happened to have three tanks passing through it.

For a fighting game with ring outs, go into training mode so that both players have some form of infinite life. Try to ring each other out. Depending on the game and the players, this can be quite difficult.

Timesplitters 2 was a console FPS that let you put a lot of bots even into a four player split-screen match. However, the AI for the bots was fairly bad. Moderately function in a basic deathmatch, it was incapable of properly using some weapons and had only the most rudimentary support for other modes. My friends and I came up with a take on deathmatch built around this failing, picking a small map (Compound was relatively small but had plenty of obstacles), turning on one-hit kills, setting everyone to spawn with dual wield SBP90s (Think dual wielded P90s with one-hit kills, and adding 10 bots. The effect was similar to shooting fish in a barrel, with players using tactics like spawning, immediately holding down the triggers, and spinning in a circle. It could either be played first to 100 points (you got 1 point per kill), or just play for five minutes or so.

For alternative solo player TimeSplitters 2 fun/bot abuse, I’d make a mine weapon set (Proximity Mine, Timed Mine, Remote Mines, and possibly TNT). Then I’d start a death match with max bot count, and see how negative the bots could go before the match ended. (If you wanted a challenge, then you tried to win before any bot went particularly low.) It was common for the majority of bots to go negative, and industrious bots could suicide faster than you could get legitimate kills.

First: Mortal Kombain is beautiful. Thank you for making me aware of it! /singletear

Second: I thought that I didn’t have any goofy game modes like this, but I have! There was a level in Half-Life 1 Multiplayer (I don’t remember the name) that had both trip mines and snarks on different points of the map.

Me and my brothers played tons of HL1 on our LAN back in the day, and one of our more sophisticated pastimes was to do a deathmatch where the only allowable weapons were the aforementioned trip mines and snarks. It quickly got *very* silly, but also allowed for some amazingly devious mine placements (you would use snarks to get people running carelessly around corners, to make the traps work, of course).